Longer lessons help to boost school’s grades

Sitting the entrance exam for Manchester Grammar school in 1954
Sitting the entrance exam for Manchester Grammar school in 1954
BERTY HARDY / GETTY IMAGES

Longer lessons to enable bright pupils to spend longer immersing themselves in ideas, topics or tasks helped Manchester Grammar School to push its GCSE results even higher this summer.

A rejig of the timetable means that pupils have six lessons a day, rather than seven, each running for 50 minutes instead of 40.

“We have slightly longer in the classroom, which works for bright pupils who can concentrate for those lengths of time,” says Martin Boulton, the high master of Manchester Grammar. “I have always been a fan of having slightly longer lessons. There are fewer changeovers, so you are actually losing less time with pupils moving around between lessons.

“The other thing is that always at the start of a lesson, and to some